Is there a solution for live imaging a Linux system?
by Red Squirrel from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5BWFE)
I had 2 drives fail in a raid. They are replaced and all is good, and no data is lost, but it made me realize how I really need a better backup solution for my VMs, and even physical systems as a whole. It's one thing to backup actual data, but it's still a pain if you lose an actual VM or system and have to rebuild/reconfigure everything.
Is there some kind of program that lets me do a disk image of a system while it's live? Hard to find anything on google while searching because all I get is results for actual live images, like CDs.
I remember using Acronis True Image Server in my IT days, is there something equivalent but for Linux, and free?
Also I want something more advanced than dd. It just makes no sense to create a 5TB image file when I might only be using like 500GB for example. I tend to overprovision my VMs a little to have some breeding room.
Edit: realized I never mentioned any platform. Ideally I'm looking for something that's fairly distro agnostic, but I am planing to move lot of stuff to Debian, so probably that will be the main platform in use. I want to be able to do it live so I can schedule it as part of regular backups.
Is there some kind of program that lets me do a disk image of a system while it's live? Hard to find anything on google while searching because all I get is results for actual live images, like CDs.
I remember using Acronis True Image Server in my IT days, is there something equivalent but for Linux, and free?
Also I want something more advanced than dd. It just makes no sense to create a 5TB image file when I might only be using like 500GB for example. I tend to overprovision my VMs a little to have some breeding room.
Edit: realized I never mentioned any platform. Ideally I'm looking for something that's fairly distro agnostic, but I am planing to move lot of stuff to Debian, so probably that will be the main platform in use. I want to be able to do it live so I can schedule it as part of regular backups.